A free fall in prices of photovoltaic solar panels has caused several large solar generating projects in California to shift plans in ways that could eventually benefit the state’s electricity consumers.

Three years ago, renewable energy developers laid plans to populate the American Southwest with massive solar thermal power plants, which concentrate the sun’s rays to boil water and create steam to turn turbines that generate electricity. But as the projects went through lengthy permitting and environmental reviews, the price of photovoltaic solar panels plummeted because of a global oversupply driven by a glut of low-cost panels from China.

That made PV panels, which are common on homes and commercial roofs, increasingly attractive to project developers, banks and utilities like PG&E and Southern California Edison, which have to justify the cost of renewable energy contracts before state regulators. Several large solar projects have now announced plans to switch from solar thermal to PV.

State energy officials say the shift will not have an immediate impact on consumers, but eventually may result in lower-priced electricity than what would have come from the solar thermal plants.

“PV is very cheap right now and it’s faster to put up,” said Paula Mints, a solar industry analyst with Navigant Consulting. Solar thermal, she added, “takes about two years to build. With PV there’s more instant gratification.”

By pairing wind and solar farms, Invenergy makes more efficient use of the transmission system

As renewable energy deals ago, General Electric’s announcement this week that it would supply 23 megawatts of solar panels for an Illinois photovoltaic farm was rather small change.

But it’s the type of thin-film solar panels and where the photovoltaic power plant will be built that foreshadows a potentially sizable business opportunity as well as a way to maximize renewable energy production.

By pairing wind and solar farms, Invenergy makes more efficient use of the transmission system, given that both sources of electricity are intermittent and tend to hit peak production at different times of day. That helps power grid operators balance supply and demand.

“You put those two together you have a much more dispatchable and local renewable system,” Victor Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business, told me Thursday. “We’ve built 30 gigawatts of wind farms so adding solar is a good utilization of assets.”

A worker steps down from the drilling platform at the Newberry Crater geothermal project near LaPine, Ore.

Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano in Central Oregon this summer to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector that has yet to live up to its promise.

They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn’t dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes — without shaking the earth and rattling the nerves of nearby residents.

Renewable energy has been held back by cheap natural gas, weak demand for power and waning political concern over global warming. Efforts to use the earth’s heat to generate power, known as geothermal energy, have been further hampered by technical problems and worries that tapping it can cause earthquakes.

Even so, the federal government, Google and other investors are interested enough to bet $43 million on the Oregon project. They are helping AltaRock Energy, Inc. of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holdings LLC of Stamford, Conn., demonstrate whether the next level in geothermal power development can work on the flanks of Newberrry Volcano, located about 20 miles south of Bend, Ore.

“We know the heat is there,” said Susan Petty, president of AltaRock. “The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic.”

The heat in the earth’s crust has been used to generate power for more than a century. Engineers gather hot water or steam that bubbles near the surface and use it to spin a turbine that creates electricity. Most of those areas have been exploited. The new frontier is places with hot rocks, but no cracks in the rocks or water to deliver the steam.

To tap that heat — and grow geothermal energy from a tiny niche into an important source of green energy — engineers are working on a new technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems.

In 2009, experts from the University of Oxford, UK, and the charity Save the Elephants set up a trial project to test whether beehives could prevent conflict on farmland boundaries.

After two years of observations, the full results of the trial have now been published in the African Journal of Ecology.

“Finding a way to use live beehives was the next logical step in finding a socially and ecologically sensitive way of taking advantage of elephants’ natural avoidance behaviour to bees to protect farmers’ crops,” said Dr Lucy King, the University of Oxford biologist who led the study.

“It was very exciting to see that our theoretical work has been converted into a practical application,” she said.

Torresol’s solar power plant became the first ever to generate uninterrupted electricity for 24 hours straight

While Americans celebrated U.S. history on the Fourth of July yesterday, a company in Spain celebrated an historic moment for the solar industry: Torresol’s 19.9 MW concentrating solar power plant became the first ever to generate uninterrupted electricity for 24 hours straight.

The plant uses a Power Tower design which features a field of 2,650 mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a boiler in a central receiver tower. The plant also utilizes molten salt as a heat-transfer fluid that allows the plant to generate electricity when there’s no sunlight. Recharge News reported on the milestone:

After commissioning in May, the plant was finally ready to operate at full-blast in late June and benefited from a particularly sunny stretch of weather, according to Diego Ramirez, director of production at Torresol.

“The high performance of the installations coincided with several days of excellent solar radiation, which made it possible for the hot-salt storage tank to reach full capacity,” Ramirez explains.

Torresol says that the plant will provide electricity for about 20 hours each day on average, with numerous days in the summer seeing 24-hours of supply. How does that compare with a similar-sized PV plant? The 21.2 MW Photovoltaic Solarpark Calaveron in Spain generates about 40 GWh a year. This smaller 19.9 MW power tower plant will generate about 110 GWh per year.

Yesterday’s news is a big milestone for Power Tower technology, which is still a very nascent technology compared to the more-mature parabolic troughs. There are only a few operating commercial-scale plants around the world, and Torresol’s is the only one with a 15-hour molten salt storage capability.

A new class of transparent photovoltaic cells has been developed that can turn an ordinary windowpane into a solar panel without impeding the passage of visible light, scientists said Tuesday.

The cells could one day transform skyscrapers into giant solar collectors, said Richard Lunt, one of the researchers on the project.

“We think there’s a lot of potential to be able to integrate these into tall buildings,” Dr. Lunt, a postdoctoral researcher at the M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Electronics, said in an interview.

Previous attempts at transparent solar cells have either failed to achieve high efficiency or blocked too much light to be used in windows. But the new cells, based on organic molecules similar to dyes and pigments, are tailored to absorb only the near-infrared spectrum and have the potential to transform that light into electricity at relatively high efficiency.

The current efficiency of the prototype cells is only about 2 percent, but some basic modifications, like stacking the cells, could increase efficiency to around 10 percent, Dr. Lunt said.

The largest challenge in developing commercial applications for the new solar cells will be longevity. The cells could be packaged in the middle of double-paned windows, which would provide protection from the elements. But the longevity of the cells would still need to approach the life span of the windows themselves, which would not be replaced for decades.

]]>http://aninspiringvoice.com/2011/04/transparent-photovoltaic-cells-turn-windows-into-solar-panels/feed/0G.E. to Build Largest U.S. Solar Panel Factoryhttp://aninspiringvoice.com/2011/04/g-e-to-build-largest-u-s-solar-panel-factory/
http://aninspiringvoice.com/2011/04/g-e-to-build-largest-u-s-solar-panel-factory/#commentsThu, 07 Apr 2011 21:32:28 +0000John Wallerhttp://aninspiringvoice.com/?p=533By TODD WOODY, New York Times

The plant will employ 400 people when it opens in 2013 and produce thin-film solar panels sufficient to generate 400 megawatts of electricity annually, or enough to power 80,000 homes a year.

In a move that could shake up the American solar industry, General Electric plans to announce on Thursday that it will build the nation’s largest photovoltaic panel factory, with the goal of becoming a major player in the market.

“For the past five years, we’ve been investing extremely heavily in solar,” said Victor Abate, vice president for G.E.’s renewable energy business. “Going to scale is the next move.”

The plant, whose location has not been determined, will employ 400 workers and create 600 related jobs, according to G.E. The factory would annually produce solar panels that would generate 400 megawatts of energy, the company said, and would begin manufacturing thin-film photovoltaic panels made of a material called cadmium telluride in 2013. While less efficient than conventional solar panels, thin-film photovoltaics can be produced at a lower cost and have proven attractive to developers and utilities building large-scale power plants.

G.E. has signed agreements to supply solar panels to generate 100 megawatts of electric power to customers, including a deal for panels generating 60 megawatts with NextEra Energy Resources.

G.E., a manufacturing giant, operates in a range of energy businesses, from nuclear power plants to natural gas turbines. It has been aggressively expanding its energy portfolio, particularly through acquisitions.

Mr. Abate said G.E. had completed its purchase of PrimeStar Solar, the Arvada, Colo., company that made the thin-film photovoltaic panels. G.E. said the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently certified that a PrimeStar solar panels manufactured at its factory in Colorado had set a 12.8 percent efficiency record for cadmium telluride technology. Conventional solar panels typically are 16 to 20 percent efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.

“We believe we’ll be a cost leader, a technology leader and we’re excited about our position in a 75-gigawatt solar market over next five years,” said Mr. Abate.

A great many studies and demonstrations have in recent years made use of the electroencephalograph, or EEG, typically worn as a “cap” studded with electrodes that pick up the electric fields produced by firing neurons.

The technique has been shown to guide electric wheelchairs or even toys, based only on the wearer’s intention.

Sound idea

However, EEGs lose a great deal of the precious information that is available closer to the brain itself, what lead author of the study Eric Leuthardt, of Washington University in St Louis, in the US, calls the “gold standard” brain signal.

“You cannot get the spatial or the signal resolution,” he told BBC News.

“One of the key features in signal resolution is seeing the higher frequencies of brain activity – those higher frequencies have a substantial capability of giving us better insights into cognitive intentions, and part of the reason EEG suffers for this is it acts as a filter of all of these high frequency signals.”

That is, the EEG picks up signals outside the skull, which acts to absorb and muddle the signals.

Electrocorticography, by contrast, is so named because it taps directly into the brain’s cortex – the outermost layer of the brain.

In a surgical procedure, a plastic pad containing a number of electrodes is implanted under the skull.

Its power has already been shown off in allowing video game play by thought alone – but in the new study, the researchers have tapped into the speech network of the brain.

Scientists at Stanford University claim a "breakthrough" that could harness energy lost as heat in solar cells

Engineers at Stanford University may have developed a way to double or triple the efficiency of solar power, in a potential breakthrough that could drop the price of solar-generated electricity to a level more competitive with fossil fuels.

Stanford’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering published a paper in the journal Nature Materials yesterday that claimed researchers there have managed to prove in laboratory tests that heat usually lost in the solar generation process can be saved by improving semiconductors.

By coating semiconductors with the metal cesium, parabolic solar dishes operating at high temperatures can retain heat from unused sunlight and avoid inefficiencies that occur after solar energy reaches a given cell, said Nick Melosh, an assistant engineering professor at Stanford.

The efficiency of a traditional rooftop solar panel tends to break down by the time temperatures have reached 100 degrees Celsius, but larger-scale parabolics would be able to operate at much higher temperatures and retain the heat by using the cesium-coated semiconductors, Melosh said.

The technology — dubbed “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” or PETE, for short — would work best in solar concentrators like parabolic dishes that can reach 800 degrees Celsius. It would not work with traditional solar rooftop panels.

“The light would come in and hit our PETE device first, where we would take advantage of both the incident light and the heat that it produces, and then we would dump the waste heat to their existing thermal conversion systems,” Melosh said. “So the PETE process has two really big benefits in energy production over normal technology.”

Melosh added that his team has been approached by several venture capital firms about the idea, though no deals have yet been struck. Stanford owns the patent on the technology, and researchers like Melosh stand to gain a percentage of the profits if the university sells the idea.

One potential roadblock is the instability of certain materials at high temperatures. The material “that we need to use is not terribly stable at high temperatures,” said Melosh, noting that his team is working on the problem.

“We’ve shown the proof of principle; we’ve done the experiments,” he said. “But we’re not about to launch a product.”

Melosh added that no more water is needed with the PETE device than with other solar technologies currently in play in California and elsewhere. In California especially, water consumption by solar plants is a big concern, and regulators have pushed developers to adopt the most efficient water saving methods available.

The next sunshine state: plans to put New York ahead of the pack in solar thermal.

By unveiling a solar heating and cooling programme that could create 25,000 new green jobs, generate US$2.6 billion in revenue and see 2 GW of new solar thermal capacity installed in the state over the next decade, New York has revealed its ambition to become America’s national leader in solar heating and cooling.

Thermal storage is also an area that, if effectively solved, would allow for additional advancement of the industry

Setting out its solar thermal roadmap, which was published at the NYSEIA conference in May 2010, the Solar Thermal Consortium (STC) plan focuses on improving uptake of solar thermal technologies through consumer education and incentives, installer training, promotions to attract manufacturers, investments in R&D, and permitting improvements.

Developed by more than 130 industrial, academic and governmental representatives, the Solar Thermal Roadmap creates a path to move New York State toward the equivalent of 1 million solar hot water collectors, or half a million residential systems, by 2020.

While these figures are still dwarfed by the German market, where around 200,000 solar hot water systems are installed annually for example, the measure is deeply significant in the US, where so far federal efforts have largely foundered and, as in many other nations, solar thermal is still the neglected poor cousin of other renewable energies like wind and solar PV.

With individual states left to devise and implement their own renewable energy programmes, the solar thermal plan for New York stands out.

The logic behind such a scheme is irrefutable, the New York Solar Energy Industries Association claims. ‘Sixty percent of the energy consumed in New York State buildings is to provide heat and hot water’, said its president, Ron Kamen, who noted that with the Roadmap: ‘New York is moving to become the national leader in the research, development, deployment and manufacture of solar thermal technologies.’

Focused on solar heat and hot water applications for buildings in New York State, the Roadmap is modeled on global best practices, as well as new ideas from the consortium. Its goal is to develop the New York State solar thermal industry so that the total installed statewide capacity grows from its current estimated level of 6 MWth to 2000 MWth by 2020, with 70% coming from residential and 30% from commercial installations.

The Roadmap’s proposed implementation would save an estimated 6 million US gal. (22.5 million litres) of oil, 9.5 million ft³ (270,000 m³) of natural gas and displace 320 GWh of electricity production annually by 2020, translating into consumer savings of more than $175 million per year, the STC claims.